Nine Little Crosses
by Broken Elsewhere
Summary: For it was Noah that killed the human in them. Noah family-centric.


**disclaimer: ** -Man and all its characters belong to Katsura Hoshino. I only claim to own this story.

**note: **I've decided to get back into my practice of writing oneshots, now that I have much more time. I've always loved the Noah - I have the unfortunate luck of loving minor characters rather than the main - and I felt they needed a backstory.  
**note2: **Stretches canon a bit, but probably not by much, since most have no backstories. I picked the Noah that had the most characterization, anyways. On a side note, writing this makes me realize just how silly the Noah's names are.

**title: **Nine Little Crosses  
**summary: **For it was Noah that killed the human in them. Noah family-centric

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1.

Road Kamelot died in squalor.

With industry booming, work quick becoming was harsh, and food hard to come by. She'd toiled in the factories alongside her family, hour after hour, but the coins they earned were never enough. It didn't matter to the factory owner; profit was everything, no matter how many were crushed along the way.

Road was too young to comprehend the greed that controlled her life. All she knew was that she was going to sicken and die, her head already bleeding and breaking with the wounds that tore across her skin like crosses. She had collapsed in a ditch beside her home at fifteen, too weak to make it to the door, and it had not been pretty. Stick thin and malnourished, Road had been a pitiful sight.

With her last breath, she cursed God.

And then she opened her eyes, entwining sickly long fingers around a man's neck – breaking and making in the waking – the Earl – the man she has seen in her dreams – his smile grows wider.

As a Noah, Road appreciated the misery that had been her human life. Next time, _next time_, she would be the one to take everything, to drench the world in blood, to play around with the lives of humans. An eternity of dreaming lay before her and not even God could stand in her way.

Road giggled.

2.

Tyki Mikk died buried beneath rubble.

It was a bad day, with more accidents than usual, and Tyki had kept thinking that he should've stayed home, should've claimed that the wounds on his head were making him dizzy. But he didn't have any money to spare, and his brother was too busy running countries to give him anything. He was glad that he had left when he did.

Tyki cursed the damp and darkness, shoveling rock as fast as he could, wishing that he had a cigarette with him. His friends were off in other parts of the tunnels, and there was no one there to talk to. Behind him, someone screamed.

He barely had to time to look upwards before the explosion happened, bringing down half the mine on their heads.

He wasn't one of the lucky ones, the people who were killed instantaneously as the rocks smashed into them. He was buried beneath the rubble, a bit of rock crushing his chest, struggling desperately towards the sliver of light he saw, as the wounds on his forehead bled out.

The Earl appeared, then, hovering above his barely alive body, and said, "_Hello._"

And so Noah took him for his own.

Sometimes, Tyki likes to treat his victims to the same experience, the burning sensation as they claw for air without any lungs.

3.

Cyril Kamelot cannot remember how he died.

He was a wealthy minister, effortlessly buying, bribing and scheming his way to the top, but dreams haunted him. In them, a little girl with an umbrella in hand smiled at him and called him 'Father'. Curiously, her skin was gray and her eyes golden, but her sweet words overwhelmed Cyril with dumb happiness that numbed the discomfort of his confusion.

He had always wanted a daughter, his first wife and son dead from childbirth and Road was perfection in and of itself. For what else could explain the sheer delight her dream-self gave him?

And then she appeared in reality, small and wonderful, and Cyril found himself neglecting his job repeatedly, for he _needed _to attend Road – her precious name – even as he felt himself grow stupider and more forgetful as she talked about 'Noah' and 'the Earl'.

He couldn't keep them straight in his head. He knew only that there was no one quite like Road out there, with her golden eyes and smile and sheer cuteness. In his clearest moments, which came when Road left him alone for a while, he wondered if there might be something _off _about her.

One day, he came across Road slicing stripes down the stomach of a rabbit, as it made horrible, panicked squeaks, and Cyril found tears coming to his eyes at the sight.

"It doesn't hurt it," Road said, and instantly Cyril felt better, knowing the animal wasn't in pain. But then it let out a very soft, very desperate whine, and Cyril was confused. He stared at his daughter, smiling happily up at him, a dagger dripping blood in her hand.

Somewhere, in the depths of Cyril's mind, a prick of suspicion made itself felt.

"Sometimes," Cyril said slowly, "I think you do something to my mind in my dreams."

Road's smile widened, and she began to laugh, and Cyril laughed with her, for he loved this child, loved her so much, even as he fell to his knees on the ground, skull splitting open as seven crosses etched themselves into his skin. He howled, and then stilled. Road leaned over him.

"Oh Father," she murmured, "If only everyone were as naïve as you are."

In that moment, Cyril knew exactly what was happening, as Noah claimed him. His last human thought was that it hadn't been naivety that had allowed his daughter to deceive him.

It had been love.

4.

Lulubell died in idle comfort.

She was a high-society girl in Paris, with the world laid out before her: riches, clothes, food, men. Perhaps it was because she was so very beautiful – so pure and intoxicating to men -, so she exploited that, turned them into fools with just one glance and ran people into ruin, coldly, mockingly.

Her very existence drove her mad.

She danced a little as she walked across the cobblestones, her skin itching for a reason, a purpose, anything to end a lifetime that amounted to teatimes and empty-headed gossip. The gilded fantasy that she called her world bored her, suffocated her.

Her head throbbed, the bag in her hand slipping from her grasp, tumbling through the air as it fell. She gasped, eyes crossing as she watched a trickle of blood slide down between her eyes.

Lulubell turned her head, eyes hot, trying to focus on her reflection in a shop window. She studied the gray skin, the shine in her eyes, the marks on her skin, and the not-her watched back. There was a rock in her hand, and then not, as the glass shattered and rained down around her.

Sometime very old inside her tried to reach up and take hold, and she clutched her aching, bleeding head in horror, her blond locks tumbling down around her as she tried to take it all in.

As she lay on pristine white sheets, head bandaged, she began to understand, even as the human in her wailed and fell against the Noah she would become. Turning her head, she scooped up a mirror, fingers tracing the contours of her face as the bandages fall away.

The eyes darkened, the cheekbones melted, the eyebrows grew thin and arched, on and on as she drew face after face across her skin. Gone was pretty blond Lulubell and her tea parties and dresses.

In this death, she could be anything she wanted to be.

5 + 6.

Jasdero and Devit died young.

Their parents lived off a shaky fortune, made from the gold their ancestors had found in the heyday of the American Gold Rushes. Their stocks were slowly dwindling, made apparent by the servants that were there one day and gone the next. Their father took to drinking, and their mother, a woman frail from carrying four children – only two of which survived – learnt to keep her head down around him.

Jasdero and Devit were confined to their beds their entire lives, watching the world through a single window, the faint rays of sunlight shining across dark hair and bright yellow locks, into the dusty room. Their world shrank to the four simple walls and a nursemaid, who forced soup down their throats with a long spoon.

The twins had been born with parts of their brains missing, as though they ought to have been born one person, and there hadn't been enough to go around. A single movement took hours, building up into frustration in each boy, as they waited in the vain hope that one day they would _live._

Hope grew into wanting, which grew into obsession. And that was when Noah found them.

Whatever movement they enjoyed was gone, as their heads bled and bled with all of Noah's memory. And something, quiet and soft, tickled in their minds, a song, over and over again.

A cradle – and another within it. Twins. It always came back to twins.

It was Noah who put them back together again, made them perfect and strong and whole, joined them together for eternity.

It was a debt they owed to Noah, to stand on steady legs beneath the sun – the real sun – and this debt could never be repaid.

7.

Skinn Bolic died twice.

New Orleans was the city of dreams, but Skinn only knew its ugly side, the back-breaking work of the shipyard and the poverty that surrounded him. Friends were rare, if they existed at all. Skinn learnt to fill his head with only thoughts of food and work and sleep, because there was nothing else to think of in New Orleans.

When the stigmata appeared, seven crosses worth of pain and suffering, Skinn could think only of blood and death and Noah, until the rage of someone from so very long ago smashed through and took him for his own.

Rage became all there was to life. No one could be forgiven. Not the Exorcists, not God, and never, _ever_ the Innocence. It drove him crazy, repeated over and over, that it needed death, it needed suffering, it needed _murder_. And Skinn was happy to oblige, because these thoughts were his own.

_Surely_.

When the black haired Exorcist struck him down, something in him cried and broke, reached out and fiddled with whatever was left inside his head. For the last agonizing seconds of his life, Skinn's thoughts belonged to no one but himself.

He never realized how much he'd missed humanity.

8.

The Earl never told anyone how he died.

He liked to make-up stories, telling Road about how he'd been a great magician ten thousand years ago, conjuring up demons and hellfire; another time he told Tyki he'd been starved to death before Noah took over, which was why he made sure to stuff himself till bursting.

The stories piled high, one on top of the other, some outrageous, some plausible. Sometimes, when the Noah considered their past lives as humans – and they so rarely did, because none of them would ever want to be human again – they accepted his stories for what they were. The Earl told them all they needed to know, that was certain.

The Earl kept the truth for himself, hidden behind his all-purpose smile. After a while, he started to wonder if his memory of a human life is real, or just another story he created.

9.

Nea Walker died without regrets.

Noah had robbed him of his memories of humanity, save the last, aching memory of his brother, and had never truly understood what it meant to die. For a long time, he had accepted his position at the Earl's side, and the Earl would never fall, and so, in turn, neither would he.

Time changed that.

His final battle, against the Earl, had been vicious. The Earl could not forgive him for slaughtering his family, and he could not allow himself to forever remain _just _a Noah. Nea had ambition beyond anything anyone could comprehend. He had sought to become the Earl himself, and that had cost him his life.

He'd never really thought of what would happen when he died. Would his essence be used to fuel the incarnations of the next Noahs? Or would his soul join the countless others in the afterlife? Somehow, he found it didn't matter.

In the moment before he died, Nea felt Mana's hand on his back tremble, and he felt at peace.

He knew they'd meet again in someday in the future, and he'd have his chance again at life. Nea died content, because one day there would be someone to carry on his will.

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**note3: **Please review.


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